Building the Corpus

The project takes an inclusive view of “health and healing” as a topic in printed works in English c.1475-1700. The bibliography has been compiled from extensive searches of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). We used a wide range of subject and title word searches including (where * is a truncation):

  • apoth*
  • doctor*
  • curg*
  • chirur*
  • medic*
  • midw*
  • physic*
  • physit*
  • cure*
  • drug*
  • heal*
  • pharma*
  • regiment*
  • remed*
  • surg*
  • ail*
  • disease*
  • fever*
  • illness*
  • malad*
  • pest*
  • plague*
  • pox*
  • sick*

In later stages of the project, in recognition that many English medical texts were translations of writings in Latin or European vernaculars, the team also searched for medical authors including well-known ancient authorities such as Hippocrates and Galen and contemporary authors like Jean Fernel, Amatus Lusitanus and Daniel Sennert. This corpus is much broader than the British Isles, because so many of the works are translations from Continental texts. Paracelsus, for example, the 16th century radical German healer who revolutionized therapeutics, can be read in English; so too can Felix Platter, the noted anatomist. Excluded texts include almanacs and Bills of Mortality and texts with less than 30% medical content, broadly described. For example, although almanacs often included some healthcare information such as good times for bleeding, such information was a relatively low proportion of the text, and, more important, they are a very substantial and clearly-defined genre.

Analytical Categories

After assembling the corpus, we coded each text with categories we designed to help users find their way. These categories include topic, genre, and occupation of the author (when stated in the text) and recorded location information. More about these categories can be found on the Key Definitions page.

  • Topics use today’s terms, such as “reproduction” and “disability”, so that readers unfamiliar with early modern English terms can find books they want.
  • Genres use terms that would be familiar to our authors, describing the kind of book that they were aiming to produce, and similarly, used authors’ own descriptions of their occupations. Genres, such as “treatise” or “dispensatory”, may be less familiar to students.
  • Persons points to actors involved in the production of a book including authors, printers, publishers and booksellers.
  • Occupations rely upon how an author identified themselves, such as astrologer or surgeon.
  • Locations include booksellers, printers, publishers, and authors.

Resources

Teaching and Learning

Our site offers a range of resources for those interested in teaching or learning about early modern medicine:

  • Context essays written by leading scholars help orient readers to the worlds of early-modern health and healing, and include links to exemplary primary sources and relevant secondary sources.
  • Classroom resources developed by experienced teachers, including syllabi and in-class exercises to illustrate how the material in REM can be used in the classroom.

History of the Project

The REM database is based largely on bibliographic data from the ESTC with additional data and analysis by project authors. Mary Fissell began work on this database in the late 1990s, attempting to document medical writing for a vernacular readership in early modern England, 1640–1800. At that point, she saw the project as providing context for her work on the book that became Vernacular Bodies by sketching out the shape of the market for popular medical books. Access to primary texts was not yet digital—one read the book itself or a microfilm. She did a key word search in ESTC titles and then examined the book’s claims to its intended readership to assess if it were for a vernacular readership.

When invited to contribute a chapter Popular Medical Print to the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Fissell pushed the project’s remit back to the beginning of print, and realized some of the depths of her ignorance. In talking with Elaine Leong, the project was re-conceived more broadly as being about all vernacular medical print in England up to 1700, and Leong built a team at the MPIWG to bring the project to a much wider audience of scholars; the project has a dual mission fostering both pedagogy and research. In 2020, the project moved to its long-term home at Johns Hopkins, where a team at the Sheridan Libraries designed and maintains this site.